NBC Contracted to Pay "Perverted Justice" Vigilantes Nearly $2 Million to Pose as Children for Online Stings

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NBC Contracted to Pay "Perverted Justice" Vigilantes Nearly $2 Million to Pose as Children for Online Stings

Who knew that posing as little boys and girls to lure predators could be so lucrative?

According to IRS documents filed by the controversial vigilante group Perverted Justice, NBC paid the group $802,520 last year for seven sting operations designed to lure online predators into sexually-suggestive conversations and, ultimately, to NBC's cameras.

NBC hired the vigilante group for its controversial To Catch a Predator series and is expected to pay the group an additional $450,000 this year, per the documents, and another $600,000 next year if the network airs all of the episodes it is expected to produce with Perverted Justice. Undercover FBI agents should be so lucky to earn that level of pay for doing the same work and much more.

Radar uncovered the documents, which Perverted Justice founder Xavier Von Erck (pictured above) filed with the IRS to obtain tax-exempt status for the group. Per the documents, Von Erck and his two staff members each earn $120,000 a year. Radar notes, in comparison, that the average salary earned by executive directors of nonprofit organizations in 2005 was less than $100,000.

This is the first time that the extent of NBC's financial arrangement with the vigilante group has been made public. Radar reports that NBC declined to comment.

Perverted Justice, and NBC's use of the group, has drawn much criticism, particularly with regard to a fatal sting operation that the group helped orchestrate for NBC in Murphy, Texas, last year – a sting that resulted in the target of the investigation committing suicide in his house while NBC's cameras waited outside.

Esquire magazine published a fascinating expose about the sting in September, depicting the sad case of a local prosecutor who was lured into an online conversation with a Perverted Justice employee posing as a thirteen-year-old boy. When the prosecutor, Bill Conradt Jr., couldn't be enticed into meeting the boy at a designated sting location, police – and NBC – tracked him down at his house where he shot himself in the head.

Conradt's sister has sued NBC over her brother's death claiming the network was more concerned with ratings than with safety. NBC's presence in such sting operations has been criticized for endangering the safety of officers and targets. Critics say that police working the sting operations overdramatize the arrests for the cameras, pointing their guns at unarmed suspects and occasionally, in the chaos of the arrests, at other officers as well. Some prosecutors have complained that the sting operations yield cases that they are unable to take to trial due to the unreliability of the evidence.

ABC's 20/20 followed the Esquire story with a broadcast version of the Murphy, Texas, tragedy. Part I is below; you can see Part II here. Note that NBC has said that the ABC piece contains a number of errors: